“Here we have fantasy, ladies and gentlemen,” Armand Fortuna says, writing the word on the green chalkboard, meticulously washed the night before in honor of his visit and lecture here at the university, “and here, we have reality.”
And the word REALITY appears beside FANTASY, distanced from it about a foot.
Armand pauses his lecture, just begun, to put a frame around each of the words.
“We merge the two supposed opposites into a third entity, which we call art.”
ART appears in a box above the two, arrows pointing to it from the two boxes below it.
“So then, art is the synthesis of fantasy and reality to produce an effect.
“But!”
Significant pause, chalk poised in the air, suspending time and focussing attention, piercing gaze from bearded, moustached visage seeming to transfix the students, individually and collectively, before he continues, “There is a contradiction, a fallacy at work here in this supposed reconciliation of opposites.
“Because-”
And he pauses again, putting a series of R’s beneath FANTASY, surrounding each with a circle, an arrow pointing from each toward the FANTASY box, before facing the amphitheater of entranced faces once more to say, “Fantasy is itself composed of reality.
“We can think only in terms of what lies within our experience, individually and collectively. Like matter, the range of imagery of which the human mind is capable can neither be enhanced nor diminished.
“It is as impossible for you to think of that which does not exist as it is to think of a color outside the visible spectrum.
“So that our wildest fantasies, our boldest imaginings are composed-in-their-entirety-of elements founded in reality, in the mundane, in the given.
“We have no choice! We cannot help ourselves! There is no escape, ladies and gentlemen, not for you, not for Armand Fortuna.
“So that art consists, then, of the rearrangement of the real, the juxtaposition, if you will, of the real elements to create an effect.”
And he draws an arrow from REALITY to FANTASY.
“Under these circumstances, then, you may well ask yourselves-or ask me, ‘How then, does one create a masterpiece’?”
“If, after all, we are as incapable of true creation as we are of creating or destroying matter-with apologies to the future nuclear physicists or future Jeopardy contestants in the crowd-then how is it possible to have a Mona Lisa, a Sistine Chapel, Michaelangelo’s David-in short, anything at all which we elevate in our sensibilities above the mundane? “The answer, ladies and gentlemen, lies in that which differentiates an art from a science.
“In science, we depend upon the fact of the whole of a quantity’s being equal to the sum of its parts.
“In art, a masterpiece is a work in which the whole of the quantity is far, far greater than the sum of its parts.
“It is the difference between a hot dog and a sausage lovingly prepared in accordance with the old secret family recipe, to cite a rather homely example.
“It is the difference between a sportscar and a steamroller, to cite an example of art applied to science in the case of the former, and the absence of such an effort’s being applied to the latter.
“Now, many of you were no doubt disappointed, after learning that I was to join you here for a series of lectures, to discover that, far from talking about drawing, painting, the other rendering techniques, I was instead to confine my disbursement of wisdom to this, this… thing we call aesthetics.
“Aesthetics, so the dictionary tells us-and I just happen to have one on me so I don’t forget what the hell I’m supposed to be doing here-is the THEORY of the fine arts and of people’s responses to them; the SCIENCE or that branch of philosopy which deals with the beautiful; the DOCTRINES of taste.
“Not to say that Noah Webster was not a brilliant, perhaps even a great man, ladies and gentlemen, but he did have his limitations. Suffice it to say that there are no Noah Websters hanging in art galleries.
“Note how he goes from theory to science to doctrine.
“Tell ya right now, boys and girls, the man is promising what I cannot deliver.
“I regret this, of course.
“Would that I could stand here and, over the course of nine weeks, propound a theory, demonstrate with absolute accuracy its unarguable facticity, and conclude by appearing before you with one or more stone tablets with the doctrine of art chiselled thereon, by either a divine or a divinely inspired hand.
“It ain’t gonna happen, folks, because I’m just not that good.”
“Did I uh, did I lose anybody on that?”
And he peers around his audience intently, eyes shielded as though from the lights, unnecessary of course since the lights are on in the auditorium to permit note-taking.
“Excellent! Nobody moved. I told ‘em those handcuffs on the arms of the seats would do the trick! “Very well, then, continuing my ego trip-”
This time he pauses for the laughter to subside, rather than over-riding it, before continuing, “We see before us on the screen there-above us, actually-my so-called masterpiece, ‘Irene I’.
“This is oil over acrylic on canvas, larger than life, done in a style reminiscent of what we might term billboard realism.
“Questions to be answered.
“Why this size? Why this mixture of media? Why this subject? Why this style, why this particular selection of elements from reality? Why not a photograph? “I am taking a great risk here tonight with you, ladies and gentlemen.
“They say that the dissection of a joke destroys the humor in it.
“Let us, then, hope that artistic representation does not suffer the same fate as comedy.
“First of all, there is the matter of the painting’s size.
“This particular canvas was stretched for me by my good and long-suffering friend…”
“You are a liar, Mr. Fortuna.”
“I beg your pardon, miss? Not to deny that I have in fact lied upon several occasions in the course of a long and checkered career, but I take it you are referring specifically to one or more points in tonight’s lecture.
“I may have been mistaken or might possibly have said things with which you might not agree, but I don’t recall having deliberately lied between seven and nine this evening.”
“Perhaps not in so many words, Mr. Fortuna, but you did lie.”
“So. Not only a liar, but a subtle liar, then, am I, according to, to… you are?”
“Jessica. Jessica Farnham.”
“Well now, Jessica Farnham, suppose you tell me wherein I have displayed my apparently subconscious tendency toward mendacity.”
“The part about when you fucked the girl.”
“What the hell-oh! President Collins! How very nice of you to come by. Did you catch my maiden lecture?”
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Armand! Just wanted to stop by and shake your hand to tell you how very pleased I am! “Got the fine arts faculty to thinking, I’m sure! “Not to mention the student body,” Collins adds, looking Jessica up and down.
“So it would seem,” Armand replies. “This is, I believe, one of your students, uh, Jessica, Jessica…”
“Famham,” Jessica completes. “Graduate student. Fine arts.”
“Yes, well, Miss Famham, what did you think of the world famous Armand Fortuna’s very first venture into the wonderful world of the academic lecture?”
“The same as yours, I would say, Mr. collins.”
“Yes, well,” looking from Armand to Jessica and back, “just wanted to stop by, as I say.
“Looking forward to next week’s lecture, Armand.
“Have a good evening now. And uh, nice meeting you, Miss Farnham.”
And Collins moves back up the aisle, leaving them alone in the vast lecture amphitheater.
“We were talking, you were talking about-”
“Fucking, Mr. Fortuna. Or may I call you Armand?”
“Please. Feel free, uh, Jessica.”
“You fucked this Irene before you did the painting, Armand.”
“I never implied otherwise, did I?”
“You most certainly did! “‘Irene I’ indeed!”
“Mystery, hidden part of personality indeed! “That’s bullshit Armand, and you know it, the part about your only just having met her.
“You knew who she was, where she came from, everything about her. You knew what she looked like, what she tasted like, what she felt like, inside and out, before you ever put brush to canvas.
“I saw the original, Armand! I saw all the paintings of Irene, all two hundred of them!”
“There were three hundred.”
“No, no, Armand. Two. Two hundred of them, you did, while she was with you.
“The last hundred are impressions, done from memory, maybe from studies or photographs, but after she left you, after she struck out on her own, to make her fortune as a fashion model.”
“You are a very perceptive young lady, Jessica! “But I assure you, my intent was not to deceive, to make less of my relationship with Irene, even at the outset. And if I-”
“Save it, Armand! The idea that she was a stranger to you when you painted ‘Irene I’ simply won’t wash, not with me.
“What I don’t understand is why you lied.”
“But I didn’t, you see.
“One may be physically intimate with a stranger, with one-one doesn’t know, know in the factual data sense.”
“She was no stranger to you at that point, Armand, not in any sense of the word. What you had to know about her, what mattered about her, you knew.”
“All right then, have it your way, rather than argue the point. But tell me-why does that upset you so? You sound almost angry.”
“Because I have a right to be-I do, and so does every woman who ever heard of you and your work.”
“I, I don’t understand.”
“Being a male chauvinist pig, of course you don’t.”
“Male chauvinist? Moi?”
“Your damn right you are! Look, just look at what you did! You took a zero, a nothing, a… a stranger-“
“Aha!”
“Yes, that’s right, a stranger, you turned her into the perfect receptacle for all your feelings, every one you ever had for every woman you ever knew or wanted to know-and spilled it out on canvas, one attitude per, for all the world to see!”
“And?”
“And? You can ask a woman, any woman ‘and’? “Why her? Why Irene? And this time, I want the truth!”
“Very well, Jessica; you want the truth and the truth you shall have-beginning with the fact that you haven’t been truthful with me.
“The real question isn’t, ‘Why her?’ is it, Jessica? “The real question is, ‘Why not me?’ “Isn’t that what you really want to know, Jessica? “Isn’t that the question you screamed at the powers that be three hundred-no, make that two hundred times? “You’re smarter than Irene, you’re more mature than Irene, you’re even more beautiful by classical standards than Irene, you were somebody, she was nobody, so why her, right? “Oh, you know the logical, the factual answer well enough.
“Irene happened to be in the right place at the right time.
“This runaway was standing on just the right street corner and I was in just the right mood to do something about it.
“You were in your freshman or your sophomore year, getting good grades, leading the right social life, perfectly content with your lot in life, and thenta-da! “Jessica, you are a beautiful, an intelligent girl, your whole life ahead of you and all that good stuff, okay? “So don’t. Don’t do this to yourself.
“Have you any idea how common, how trite that is, what you’re thinking? “I mean, my agent in New York is a woman, Jessica. And she predicted exactly this reaction on the part of women everywhere.
“So why don’t you stop being so obvious, so predictable? “Be your own person, Jessica! Live your own life, and don’t eat yourself up over what might have been.
“What’s done is done and can’t be undone.”
“That’s very true, Armand-ail of it; only tell me, Armand: Of all the women who feel as you say they do, how many of them have come up to you and point blank asked the question?”
“Very well then, Jessica; you take the prize for blatancy. Happy now?”
“Not for nothing, Armand, but you must be one terrific lover!”
“No, no, no, Jessica!” Armand chuckles, pointing at her, breaking out into laughter, “You are not gonna get me to come out on that one! “That’s been done before. Remember the Darlene series-Darlene who came to me as a model.
“Three hundred Irenes, fifty Darlenes-I have done all the paintings of women in series I intend to do, now or ever.”
“Who’s talking about paintings, Armand? “I was talking about you in the sack, not on canvas.”
“And now that you know that there is not the remotest possibility of my immortalizing you-now how do you feel, Jessica?”
“Like hitting the sheets with you-if you’re up to it.”
“You disappoint me, Jessica. You really do, adding that last. You had me going, there for a minute, I’ll give you that much credit.
“My macho is not the issue here, Jessica. I have nothing to prove to you or anyone else.
“I don’t care if you think I’m impotent or gay or whatever, and I think you an utter fool for believing otherwise.
“Who are you to challenge me, Jessica? Just what is that supposed to mean, ‘if I’m up to it’?”
“It means exactly what it says.
“As for insulting you, what’s that, compared to the gratuitous insult the Irene series represents to the women of America, of the world.
“Who are you to arbitrarily, by random chance, dip- your almighty hand into the fishpond of an entire gender and casually proclaim our absolute lack of value, one from another, by artificially elevating one of us over all the rest? “Because, by doing that, Armand, don’t you destroy, haven’t you destroyed the hopes and dreams of a million women by telling them, in essence, that they are merely blind replicas, all, all stamped from the same mold, like toy soldiers, one of whom you have selected at random to paint up as a general? “You’re insulted, Armand? What about me, all of us?”
Armand sighs, stuffing his briefcase with his notes.
“Okay,” he says, “let’s go. You’re on, in your capacity as emissary from the planet Femina.”
“Take me to your pad, earthman.”
“Disappointed?” Armand asks, as Jessica looks around at the pillared emptiness of the loft, once the top floor of a warehouse.
“Mmmm, more like, surprised. This looks like something an artist, somebody holding his own but not famous, would have.
“I thought you’d be wisking me up to Connecticut rather than down to the Village.”
“No, and you’re right. This is where I started.
“And right down there, up on the corner, across the street, is where I first saw Irene.”
“Well gee, Armand, that IS a thrill! Maybe you should have the city put a bronze plaque in the fucking pavement!”
“Sorry,” he says, “uh, up there in that corner is where I actually live.
“It was possible in the early days for me to just heat the apartment up there on the mezzanine and leave the rest of the place cold.”
Jessica says nothing, actually preceding him up the short flight of stairs to his apartment-a one-room affair with kitchen alcove and bathroom.
“How can you-I mean why do you still uh… live like this?”
“D’you have to know everything, Jessica?”
“Sorry. Just, I thought, with what you must have amassed by now-never mind.
Like you say, it’s none of my affair.”
“Bathroom’s through-”
“I see it.”
And Jessica begins removing her clothing at once, casually, unselfconsciously.
Amused, Armand follows suit.
When they are both naked, she says, “Excuse me,” and closets herself in the bathroom, whence Armand can hear the water running.
When she emerges, it’s his turn.
Coming out, he sees her on the bed, stripped of its covers, just lying there on her side, awaiting him.
“Ooh, muscles!” she exclaims, fingering his. abdominals, protruding but well defined.
“Yes, I spend quite a bit of time at the gym these days,” he says.
Telling her that he is painting nothing at the moment, that he might not ever again so much as touch a brush.
Telling her that he is living here still, not because he has to, but because here is where the memories of his creativity linger, the ghosts of his inspiration.
And he resides among them, waiting for the lightning to strike once again, anticipating the moment and dreading it for what it will demand of him, what it will take out of him.
A long time since he has had a woman up here, he reflects, as he begins to explore her body with hands and mouth, squeezing her breasts with both hands as he feeds them to himself one at a time while she is content to lie back and passively receive his attentions.
Very well endowed indeed, she is, he notices.
She is one of those women who, for some reason, seem to have much less to offer with their clothes on than with them off.
And now, he browses her flesh with lips and tongue and teeth, chewing his way gently down, down, down to her bush.
Which he engulfs with a wide bite, head turned sideways as he raises and spreads her legs, holding them thus, bent at the knee, hands on the backs of her thighs.
As he makes a meal of her cunt, strumming her joy buzzer with the flickering tip of his tongue, and now tongue-fucking her, shafting the long, thick, powerful appendage in and out of her hot, juicy depths, tongue in contact with her die at all times.
And she is right and she is wrong, he thinks.
Because he does have this faculty-given a certain quality of female raw material with which to work-of turning his partner of the moment into an object of physical adulation, losing himself in her, exciting himself by means of her, revelling in her simply being there, as though he is some convict with his very first woman after having served a very long celibate sentence, perhaps~ after having celibacy be the sentence.
So that there is a passion at work here, an unmistakable hunger, an ardent enthusiam whose genuineness is indisputable.
And Jessica looks down at the top of Armand’s busily working head and smiles, radiant in her self-confidence now, seeing here an opportunity for- never mind, she cautions herself. Time enough later for all that.
For the moment, she had best stick to this phase of the project.
And the best way to do that, she realizes, is to simply let herself go, to surrender to the flood of lascivious sensation which wells up within herself, to simply let it come, devoid of all ulterior motive.
Even now, Armand’s cock twitches to turgid, vibrant life-easily, automatically, no strain at all, as always.
So that now, he pulls his face back from her crotch, sitting back, haunches to heels, cock bobbling stiffly before him, rising from his thatch. at a steep, upward angle, the knob bulbous, the shaft long, thick, rock-hard.
And now, he is on her and in her, his cock shafting into the warm, pressurized moisture of her hot pussy in one smooth movement.
And now, he is scooping her thighs up from beneath, doubling her up, impaling her on his cock, foreshortening her pussy on it, arms holding her thus as his hands once again grasp her big boobs.
So that he is sucking the doorbells of her nipples, making them firmly erect, even as the piston action of his cock turns her pussy into a sucking, clinging mouth.
So that now they are rising together, up, up, up the rainbow of their shared arousal, becoming hotter and hotter, their faces and upper bodies reddening with the engorged blood of their thoroughly aroused passion.
This is his favorite position, Armand realizes. He is above her and below her, inside and outside her, all around her.
He has enveloped her in his maleness.
And she is right; he is a male chauvinist, and yes, the pig epithet can well be added as well.
Because he wants tits and pussy and legs and bod and he could really care less what is the personality, what are the thought processes behind these.
And yes, he is shallow, has always been shallow, has deceived himself whenever he pretended otherwise.
Because this, this! is all there is, he realizes. And the rest-all the rest-is bullshit. His reason for being here with her tonight? He just wanted a piece of ass, is all. And the rest, the buildup has importance, meaning, value to him only to the extent that it worked, in that it produced that which he wanted, that which he had been missing for so long.
Because this is all there is, all that matters-so that it will simply have to do, will have to be adequate, will have to satisfy the emptiness, the voids in his existence.
And the creature of the moment is adequate to the purpose-again, as usual, as always.
If he is up to it?
My dear, these days, Armarnd tells her in silence, this is all that I am up to!
Certainly, he is not up to picking up a brush or even a piece of charcoal and doing something, anything with it.
But this, this! he can do, is doing, is carrying to fruition now, as he comes and comes, injecting wad after wad of his pent-up load in and in and into her, in counterpoint to the convulsive spasms of her series of multiple orgasms as she too climaxes, soaring with him through the thrilling realms of a shared sexual paradise, not separating until their last orgasmic twinge passed, they land back on earth.